By some trial and error following a bit of google research it seems that zone alarm is the culprit. When I disable it my apple tv appears as if by magic in itunes.

So my question is what do i need to tweak in zone alarm to get it to allow apple tv and itunes to communicate? On the zone alarms control menu I had already set it up to allow apple mobile devices and also bonjour. I'm not sure what to do next though.

Yes, PC with XP. I just tweaked the zone settings on zone alarm for itunes and changed it from 'trusted' to 'internet'. This worked for a while but when I tried disconnecting then reconnecting it was no longer working.

I'm toying with re-installing zone alarm although I did just read somewhere that there is an issue with an apple update affecting zone alarm...

Any ideas - this is almost as annoying as the strife I had with airport express!

This is just a thought, and not based on actual knowledge or anything like that (hey, this is a forum after all) but are you using the free version of Zone Alarm? It has all the basic functionality, but to do certain more exotic things, like err... getting two devices to talk to each other on a network, you may have to ungrade to the paid version to get access to the settings which need tweaked.

Certainly when I set up a peer-to-peer connection (i.e. two computers directly linked, no router involved) I had to turn off ZA and revert back to Windows Firewall on at least one, possibly both of the computers.

I've uninstalled zone alarm and then downloaded it again (I had a spring clean recently).

The version I downloaded from cnet is actually the PRO version on a 15 day free trial (misleading as the page describes it as the free version). Anyway, I've set it up and all seems well, although I still can't finded a trusted sites area.

I will probably just re-install the free version of zone alarm in 15 days time and if there are problems again then I will know that tractorboy was on to something. It's good to have Apple TV working properly, it's a great piece of kit when it plays the game.